Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Various approaches have been proposed to prevent traffic on a local area network (LAN) from being disrupted by a network storm, such as a broadcast, multicast, or unicast storm, on one of the physical interfaces. Such a network storm occurs when packets flood the network, creating excessive traffic and degrading network performance. FIG. 1 illustrates a block diagram of a system 100 configured to manage a network storm. In this system, host servers 130, 132, 134, and 136 are configured to couple to physical ports 104, 106, 108, and 110 of a physical switch 102, respectively. In the event a virtual machine 122, supported by the server host 134, is found to cause a network storm, one conventional approach is to disable the physical port 108 of the physical switch 102, resulting in the disabling of not only the virtual machine 122 but also all other virtual machines supported by the host server 134, such as a virtual machine 120. As has been demonstrated, an improved approach to manage network storms without disabling virtual machines unnecessarily is desired.